PLG misconceptions, free-to-paid conversion, & PLS survey results

Because they don’t meet the koalafications.

Welcome to the PLG Recap

I spend all week deep diving into the best PLG LinkedIn posts so you don't have to.

Here are my top 5 favorites from last week!

1️⃣ Ben Williams

Strategy or Tactic? Strategy

Growth lever = All levers

Recap

• Ben shares with us his core PLG framework for product growth leaders consisting of Opportunity Discovery, Solution Discovery, and Value Delivery

• I appreciate the firm stance on value delivery which is about emphasizing the need to build great solutions that customers love

• The framework is continuous, cross-functional, and collaborative

2️⃣ Andrew Capland

Strategy or Tactic? Tactics

Growth lever = All levers

Recap

• I love it when Andrew drops these nuggets on the theme of “contrary to popular belief".” This is about PLG misconceptions.

• PLG is a marketing strategy → wrong

• PLG = no sales team → wrong

• PLG takes a lot of tools → wrong

• It is getting more and more abundantly clear that PLG is a company-wide strategy that requires product, data, and eng buy-in at the leadership level.

3️⃣ Alexa Grabell

Strategy or Tactic? Strategy

Growth lever = All levers

Recap

• Alexa surveyed 200+ folks at different companies such as Airtable, Snyk, and Linear and gathered some incredible insights around PLS (product-led sales).

• My favorite stat: 86% of customers try before they buy as an entry point to sales conversations. This is huge!

• It’s clear that self-serve is dominating the buying process, so maybe we should just lean in.

• This is where PLS comes into play. There are actually more revenue opportunities by focusing on self-serve expansion + PQLs.

4️⃣ Adam Jarczyn

Strategy or Tactic? Tactic

Growth lever = Monetization

Recap

• Inquisitive and thought-provoking post on the complexities of paid plans with trials. How do you determine the problem if conversion is low?

• Adam brings up 3 things to investigate when this happens:

  • Are the features worth paying for?

  • Are they the wrong features?

  • Is the trial length long enough to experience value?

• Do these 3 things before introducing a reverse free trial modal in your product.

5️⃣ Kyle Poyar + Leah Tharin

Strategy or Tactic? Tactic

Growth lever = Monetization

Recap

• Kyle and Leah joined forces! Leah shared with us exactly how she increased free to paid conversion rate by 89% 🤯 

• My favorite part of this experiment was how Leah split the experiment funnel into two areas of insight to understand the outcome:

  1. Free to try → this will tell you if the feature being gated is valuable to a high degree of accuracy

  2. Trial to customer → this will tell you if the feature is actually good

• Leah is spreading a lot of great knowledge about the importance of a growth business case when introducing a new experiment/feature.

6️⃣ Drew Teller - featured post (I am trying something new 😉 )

I was featured in a post by Product-Led Alliance. 👏 

They shared my PLG monetization article back in March 2022 where I bring attention to the connection between Usage-based and Feature-based pricing strategies and freemium vs free trial.

The monetization strategy of feature vs usage-based pricing should be a major variable in deciding whether to go free trial or freemium.

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See you next time.

-Drew